


Like a Refugee

by Rakefetzyz



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Drug Use, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Loss of Parent(s), Loss of Sibling(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-15
Updated: 2018-11-18
Packaged: 2019-08-24 03:24:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16631969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rakefetzyz/pseuds/Rakefetzyz
Summary: Karen Page from before the flashback in season 3, episode 10,  until her date with Matt in season 2, episode 5.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is my second title from Leonard Cohen's Anthem.

Every heart to love will come  
But like a Refugee

\--- Leonard Cohen, Anthem

  
  
-

“Are you going to die?” Kevin asked.

Karen kicked him under the table. 

Her fourteen-year-old brother must be as scared as she was. She might have excused his thoughtlessness. But her mother's feelings were what mattered right now. 

“We're all going to die eventually,” Paxton Page answered his son. “But first we're going to help your mother fight this.”

The Page family sat at a table in the closed diner. It was late at night, the only time all four could sit together privately. At normal meal times they had to serve their customers

Penny had called the meeting saying there was something important the children needed to know. She told them simply that she had been diagnosed that morning with ovarian cancer. 

Karen had assumed her mother's “female trouble" was due to premenopausal symptoms. “What’s the prognosis?” 

The answer made her wish she never asked. Less than a forty percent five year survival rate. 

“But we’re all going to help you fight this,” Paxton repeated. He expected Karen and Kevin to help out at the diner more, after school and on weekends and vacations. With all the medical expenses they would not be able to hire extra staff.

Ill and woozy from chemo and tired out from weekly trips to the hospital in Burlington, Penny took Karen aside. “I love your dad as much as the day we married. But this town is dead. I want you to apply to college. I don’t want my daughter stuck in Fagan Corners like me. 

Karen listened, sent in her applications, and was accepted at Georgetown. But then her mom got even sicker.

She had already started learning bookkeeping from her mother and now she kept the accounts whenever Penny felt too ill to do it herself. 

“Your dad's a good man, Karen, but he was never practical with money and Kevin is too young. You will need to be the practical one now.”

Penny remained cheerful and optimistic to the end. She bought a lottery ticket each week, always hopeful although she never won more than an additional ticket. Two days before she died she even checked Karen's bookkeeping. 

Paxton and Kevin both cried the first night. Karen remained dry eyed while her chest ached and her throat hurt when she tried to swallow. Someone had to stay strong to make the arrangements with Reverend Shockne and the undertaker. Paxton was too shattered. Kevin was still only fifteen. That left eighteen-year-old Karen. She fought back her tears and stayed strong.

The morning of the funeral Kevin knocked on her door. “This danged tie is giving me trouble.”

She brought him into her room and tied it for him. Kevin left to comb his hair and Karen went to find her father. Now that her mother was gone he would need her to tie his tie for him too.

She requested and received a deferment from Georgetown. Mrs. Dale, the AP English literature teacher, almost had a fit. She only relented when Karen explained about her mother’s death from cancer and that her dad and younger brother needed her to stay close.

“Next year no excuses. I can’t let my best student waste her life in a diner.” But in her heart Karen knew that her family would need her next year too.

Her eyes stung with unshed tears for her mother. But she still had a father and little brother who depended on her. She loved them and would never leave them to fend for themselves. If she did the diner was sure to go under.

“Mom, I need you so much,” she screamed silently. “Now I’m stuck here too.”

There would be no going away to college. But she could get a taste of college life closer to home. Some high school friends were going to college in a nearby town down the highway. They started inviting her to frat parties. Karen went along whenever she could get away from the diner for an evening. 

At one rowdy party she met Todd Neiman. The admiring look from this tall, good looking guy, as he watched her dance, was enough to make her agree to go home with him. But it was his trailer that won her heart. 

The small shabby trailer symbolized freedom. Todd wasn’t stuck in Fagan Corners. Any time he chose he could hitch the trailer to his pickup truck and drive away. If only they could hitch the trailer and escape together.

Todd preferred a different kind of escape. He offered her a white crystalline powder. 

Drinking was normal at the college parties and she had tried smoking weed once with her friends in high school. Anything more didn’t go with her image of herself as a good daughter and student. 

But Todd insisted that the powder would make her feel good. She felt so trapped in this nothing town and the dreary diner, he didn’t have to urge her twice. He demonstrated how to snort the powder up his nostrils and she copied his example.

The sudden elation and burst of energy proved Todd right. When the sensation wore off, all she wanted was to feel it again. She didn’t know exactly when she got addicted. Todd provided her with the powder as long as she stayed with him and helped him to sell at college parties. 

It wasn’t the escape she had dreamed of but it was an escape all the same.


	2. Chapter 2

Life with Todd and cocaine snorting went on for months. Until the terrible night when Kevin set fire to the trailer. The night her desperate attempt to save Kevin from Todd ended with her killing him instead. 

“Thank God your mother wasn't alive for this,” said her father.

Karen was too grief stricken and ashamed to point out that if her mother had lived she would be at Georgetown now and Kevin would be alive too. Choking on her tears, she accepted the blame. Kevin was dead because of her.

At her father’s wish she packed and left home the next day. The car was totaled but the idea of driving now made her sick in any case. She boarded a bus to Burlington and took a room in a seedy hotel. 

On a sagging bed and with plaster flaking down on her from the stained ceiling, she went through cocaine withdrawal. The crash from going cold turkey, cravings, mood swings and insomnia, she felt that the withdrawal symptoms were less than she deserved. 

When she began to feel better physically she found a temp job and a cheap apartment. 

The next few years she moved around a lot, letting few people into her life. She never did drugs again.

She tried to be a good person and to do acts of kindness when she could. It would never be enough to make up for Kevin’s death. But she hoped to at least partially atone. 

Eventually, she found a secretarial job at Union Allied Construction and moved to Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan. When she discovered the suspicious pension file, she did the right thing, reported it to her boss. 

The next day she wound up covered in blood and arrested for murder.

After the two young lawyers, Matt and Foggy, got her cleared, she started working at their new firm. The handsome, blind lawyer, Matt, made her heart do a little flip whenever she saw him. It almost seemed as if he sensed it. But she knew that wasn't really possible. 

She worked along side them against the evil that was dominating the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood. But she never told them about her past or what had happened to Kevin. 

They were such good people. Foggy had an open, natural goodness. Matt had a darker, moodier side, but his goodness shone through too. They liked her and believed that she was good like them. She couldn’t bear to think of losing that.

A representative of the evil, James Wesley, abducted her one day, demanding that she help his boss, Wilson Fisk.

“I’d rather die first.” Karen said firmly. 

But Wesley wasn’t ready to kill her, not yet. 

“When you have no tears left to shed, then... then we’ll come for you, Miss Page.” 

He was planning to make her watch all her loved ones die. 

But Karen had seen her mother die from cancer, had watched her little brother die because of her own terrible choices.

No one else – no one she loved or cared about -- was going to die because of her. She snatched the gun and stopped Wesley in the only way possible to be sure he could never hurt anyone ever again.

Shaken and scared, she wiped her fingerprints, then fled. Strange that when she was falsely accused of murder her hands had dripped with blood, yet now that she had deliberately killed a man her hands were spotless. But they didn’t feel clean. No part of her did. After she disposed of the gun she went home and spent a long time in the shower trying to wash the deed away.

But killing was not something that could be washed clean in the shower. Now she had another terrible secret she had to keep from Foggy and Matt. If they knew, they would be sure to judge her. She couldn’t face their judgement.

Time passed and at last Matt asked her out. They spent a beautiful night together, wishing it would never end. They kissed and never wanted to stop kissing. She desired something more than kissing and it seemed that he desired it too.

But when she invited Matt up to her apartment he wouldn’t come.

“I have this incredible ability to bring disaster to the best things in my life,” he said by way of explanation. 

What if she told him that she had brought disaster too? Matt always treated her as though she was so innocent and sweet. Any sweet innocence in Karen died the day her mother was first diagnosed with cancer. But she liked how Matt thought of her that way. And she was afraid he would stop having feelings for her if he knew the truth.

Maybe someday she could tell him. She wasn't ready to risk it yet.


End file.
